Trauma Theatre
If we want to be shocked, we don't go to the theatre. The theatre is a nice thing to do of an evening - a pleasant social occasion that can serve as a family outing, a harmless first date, or a place to meet friends. We don't expect too much violence, too much sex, or too many expletives.
When the BBC decided to screen 'Jerry Springer: The Opera' earlier this month, they couldn't have anticipated the kicking they would get from the public. Middle England spat out its cornflakes and said that no, thank you very much, it didn't want to see such filth. Tory MPs were on the air for a week, declaring that the Beeb should have picked a 'nicer play' - something the whole family could gather round and watch while toasting crumpets by the fire. The guardians of our national morals were offended that the theatre, and the Royal National Theatre no less, should be offering something so unpleasant. Presumably they wanted something like a nice period dress production of 'The Importance of Being Earnest'. It is true that 'Jerry Springer: The Opera' is pretty foul-mouthed. More importantly, for the Daily Mail and the Christian lobby, it does feature Jesus on stage. Singing. In a nappy. But it's also a devastatingly incisive, funny analysis of American society and our own. And there was always the possibility, as the odd Guardian writer timidly pointed out, of switching channels if it all got too much. To the BBC's credit, it bit the bullet and screened it anyway. But why did it face such hysterical opposition - almost entirely from people who hadn't seen the play, and didn't know what it was about?
In Birmingham last December, this Philistinism took on a far darker tinge. The Birmingham Rep theatre was putting on a play called Bezhti ('Dishonour'). It featured sexual abuse taking place within a Sikh temple. The Rep went out of its way to liaise with the local Sikh community. Local Sikh leaders recommended re-staging it in a community centre. The Rep refused. There were riots on the streets; the police refused to guarantee the safety of the actors and the play closed after a week. Nothing was done and little was said to help the theatre or the writer, Kurpreet Kaur Bhatti, who is a Sikh himself and still receives death threats about the play.
Why did no government minister come out fighting for the theatre or the playwright? Estelle Morris, our semi-transparent Arts Minister, stayed silent. Others commented that it was a difficult issue and that the play sounded offensive. How many had read it? As with Jerry Springer: The Opera, a religious pressure group resorted to tactics of intimidation and bullying, but this time they won.
Bezhti and Jerry Springer were both condemned on religious grounds, but it doesn't take anything that politically dangerous for the theatre to cause a shock. Just a bit of sex and violence will do the trick; as audiences walk out in droves and the critics delight in feigning horror. The late Sarah Kane's play Blasted premiered at the Royal Court in 1995, and the reviews bordered on the hysterical. "This disgusting feast of filth," ranted The Daily Mail. "Watching it is like eating your own offal." The criticism at the time was unanimous. Admittedly Blasted is pretty tough stuff: it features anal rape and baby eating, among other things. But would a film ever have caused such universal shock? Slap an 18 rating on a movie and you're covered; yet it doesn't matter how much you warn people about a play, it is still seen as 'high culture' - and as such should be decorous, fully clothed, and nicely spoken.
That modern theatre so often refuses to be as mild as this is appropriate. Theatre has a long history of shocking audiences and critics alike, and of being left out in the cold by the authorities. Many of the plays most reviled by contemporary audiences are most revered by those that come later. Heinrik Ibsen's classic A Doll's House, which ends with a woman walking out on her husband and children, sent shock waves around Europe: preachers railed against it from the pulpit and denounced it as a Satanic play. Luigi Pirandello's equally important Six Characters in Search of an Author caused riots at its premiere because of implications of incest. Accidental Death of an Anarchist was written only three decades ago, but its author, Dario Fo, is still in fear of reprisals from the Milanese police is satirises. Most people go to the theatre to be entertained, not challenged, and when they are challenged they don't like it.
Perhaps things are slowly changing. The current generation of playwrights is gradually anaesthetising the intelligentsia to 'shock theatre'. It takes more than it did in times past to get the kind of outraged reviews Blasted earned in 1995. The mainstream success of plays like Shopping and Fucking are making us harder to shock.
The National Theatre is currently touring a new production of the Olivier Award-winning The Pillowman, by Martin McDonagh. The play in question is the story of a writer in a totalitarian state whose stories dwell on subjects like child murder and paedophilia. He is interrogated and bullied for writing them - not unlike Kurpreet Kaur Bhatti, you might think. The Pillowman is savage and brilliant; Edward Hogg, who plays one of the leads, told me he thought it was "one of the most wonderfully beautiful plays" he'd ever read. Yet despite little action taking place on stage the verbal descriptions were enough to cause walk-outs during the show and a minor exodus at half-time. At the interval press drinks, another reviewer asked me if I thought "all that violence and all those shocking things were really necessary". Of course, "all those shocking things" were very necessary: they were the things that shook the thoroughly nice Oxford audience out of its satisfied enjoyment. It's hard to be complacent when you're jumping out of your seat or feeling sick. It is, of course, infuriating that the theatre comes in for criticism every time it does anything out of the ordinary or shows anything unsavoury. But the fact that it still retains that power to shock is gratifying.
The Pillowman is running at the Oxford Playhouse until Saturday, and is then touring
3rd Feb 2005